On Anti-Blackness

Some very vocal parents and local activists claim that CRT teaches young Black kids that they are powerless to do anything about their situation. They worry that treating ideas like white privilege and systemic racism as settled social facts in the classroom gives kids the idea that Black and white people are permanently assigned to the categories of oppressed and oppressor. This is usually followed by some racist misunderstandings of cultural-specific pedagogy, which is the actual thing they are talking about when they talk about CRT in schools.

This has always been bullshit. Making sure tests and lessons use reference points that are familiar to the kids in class and teaching how past discrimination materially affects the present is not a mission of disempowerment. The entire idea is to prepare kids, both minority and white, to address these systemic issues. And guess what?

They absolutely are.

Part of the reason we send kids to school is to integrate them into a shared reality. The rules, customs, and histories that they learn in school are what place them into a pool of shared knowledge. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and two plus two equals four. So when we teach kids history, which version of history they get will determine how they view the world and how it works. At least for the majority of those who don’t go on to be history nerds. So I started thinking about how society wanted me to view the world and my place in it as I was growing up. 

Lean on me

People throw around the term “anti-Black” in ways that can be unspecific and self-serving. Criticizing a Black man for the abusive way he treats women is not anti-Black. Anti-Blackness is not being mean to a specific Black person. Anti-Blackness instead, refers to a belief that culture, language, and knowledge that is considered to be specific to the Black community is ontologically deficient. It’s the idea that Black people need fixing before they are able to achieve the same general level of success as white people or other more socially mobile minority ethnic groups. 

I grew up in the ‘90s, a period of strong economic growth, general positive vibes, the end of history, and virulent anti-Blackness. 

For instance, let's look at the 1989 Morgan Freeman lead film Lean on Me. The movie tells the “true” story of Joe Clark, a tough no-nonsense principal who uses unconventional tactics to save a crumbling New Jersey public school. This movie was an absolute cultural touchstone in the Black community. It was one of those holes you had punched on your Black card lest it be revoked. It was shown to kids in schools and most conversations about Morgan Freeman would include at least one person mentioning how great he was in Lean on Me. 

It was also an extremely anti-Black movie, with themes and messages that would have David Duke nodding in agreement. 

Lean on Me opens with the school transforming from a nice-looking school with mostly white kids and clean empty hallways to one filled with black and brown students, graffiti on the walls, open-air drug dealing, casual assault, and violence. The montage ends with a white teacher getting jumped by Black students and leaving the school on a stretcher. Guns and Roses' iconic anthem Welcome to the Jungle plays during all of this. 

When Joe Clark is called in to save the school, he is saving it from the Black kids that attend. His enemy is a culture that is coded as “Black” which emphasizes and celebrates the libidinal pleasures of sex, drugs, and thoughtless violence over traditional American values like hard work, studiousness, good manners, and sacrifice. This malicious cultural rot is aided and abetted mainly by Black women. Both single mothers who aren’t taking parenthood seriously enough and failed to pick decent partners in child rearing, and also Black women in administrative positions who irrationally reject the masculine and authoritarian attention that Joe Clark is attempting to give these kids for their own benefit. 

When I was a teenager growing up in a nominally middle-class Black cultural milieu, this all made perfect sense. I had been inundated with cultural messaging telling me that there were two types of Black people. Those who worked hard, stayed in school, and were able to avoid the traps laid for them by American racism by presenting themselves as beyond reproach and quintessentially American. And then there were those Black people who….did other things. Basically, I was raised to believe that I was one of the good ones. And the bad ones were in need of a Joe Clark figure to set them straight, that is if they were even capable of being saved. 

As I alluded to, this message was heavily reinforced by Black pop culture. Comedians like Chris Rock had his infamous “Niggas vs Black people”  routine, Dave Chappelle gave us the character of Tyrone Biggums - the irrepressible and inveterate crack addict, and of course, Bill Cosby waxed poetic about Black people willing to die by police violence over pound cake. When the ebonics controversy in Oakland’s public schools became a national story, Black political luminaries like Maya Angelou and Jesse Jackson spoke out against relegating Black youth to an “inferior” linguistic standard. 

When You’re Not Strong

I believe that a large part of Lean on Me’s popularity is due to how the film is structured. In many ways, the movie resembles a lot of underdog sports movies that were popular in the 80s and 90s. For kids like me, Lean on Me felt like a grittier, more realistic version of a movie like The Mighty Ducks, where a roguish coach has to convince a group of perpetual losers that they are capable of winning it all. In the case of Joe Clark, the big game takes the form of standardized testing. The school’s test scores will determine if it falls into state control or not. 

Joe Clark is hired by the school superintendent specifically to help the school avoid falling into state receivership. Clark carries a baseball bat around as an implicit threat, expels hundreds of kids deemed to be too far gone, and routinely verbally abuses children to the point where, in an incredibly disturbing scene, he tells a kid struggling with drug problems to jump off the roof of the school. The implication is that this kind of paternalistic authoritarianism is better delivered by a member of the community who cares about these kids than the white representatives of the “state” who sees them only as embarrassing statistics. 

This is a very important aspect of the plot. It’s the reason why this movie resonated with my parent's generation and why it was thought of as a film with an important message for the youth. For nearly as long as there have been Black people in America, there has been the sentiment within the community that we must be absolutely brutal to our own kids for the purposes of keeping them obedient and subsequently safe from white supremacy. Conservative anti-Blackness is less a qualitative statement on the morality and functionality of Black culture as it is simply a strategy of survival. 

In reality, the results of the real Joe Clark were not so unequivocally positive. He was able to raise test scores in that first year but only because he expelled 300 of the worst-performing students. While the movie shows Clark eventually winning over the hearts and minds of the students, teachers, and community at large, many of the Black teachers and other school officials opposed his authoritarian methods and never stopped challenging his grip on the school. Most tellingly, despite the movie depicting Eastside High as mostly white before things started going downhill, the school had a majority-minority population going as far back as the ‘60s. 

Recent retrospective critiques of Lean on Me have made the point that the film neither presents nor even attempts to tackle any structural social causes for the school's problems. White flight and the resulting disinvestment of majority-minority areas are not mentioned. Drugs and single motherhood are prominently featured as major issues for these kids to overcome, but no mention is made of the racist nature of the drug war and how racist disparities in drug sentencing are what created so many of these single-parent households in the first place. The deindustrialization that economically eviscerated blue-collar states like New Jersey and was disproportionately hard on Black workers is not mentioned. All the obstacles that Joe Clark and his students must defeat are internal. The only changes to be made are with individual attitudes about self-respect and success. 

I would argue that the film doesn’t completely ignore these structural factors as much as it bundles them up in the form of the pending state takeover. However, these disadvantageous social structures are not to be challenged. If the state takeover is meant to represent white supremacy then it is clear that such racial marginalization cannot be directly addressed in any meaningful way. It can only be appeased by proving the market worth of these individual Black kids on a standardized test. Absent the 300 or so kids that Clark expelled of course. 

And therein lies the fundamental tension within anti-Blackness. An anti-Black worldview doesn’t necessarily deny the existence of racism or white supremacy but rather sees these things as fundamental gears driving the machinery of American exceptionalism. Racial marginalization is just an unfortunate natural phenomenon in the American project, but it can be mitigated and overcome with some forethought and hard work. And it's very much worth noting that in the real story of Joe Clark, much of his support came from white politicians and administrators. 

I’ll help you carry on

One of the ways that the enslavement of African people and the subsequent disenfranchisement of freed Black people was intellectually justified was the idea that Black people were less evolved than Europeans. Left to our own devices, the natural inclination of the Black person was to be lazy, lustful, and violent. Black men present a violent sexual threat to white women and Black women were more than happy to be a drain on the resources of hard-working Americans while irresponsibly procreating. 

This is all ugly and gross and has never been substantiated as anything biologically or culturally endemic to Black people specifically, but nevertheless has been the basis of much social policy in this country. Especially when it comes to material government assistance. 

From the labor camps disguised as reform schools like Mount Meigs to work requirements placed on welfare, there is a cruel irony in the attitude that a people whose creation was based on forced labor without pay needed to be taught the value of hard work. But this attitude has persisted and to a certain point has been internalized by many Black people who have successfully navigated the nominal meritocracy of America. 

Things have changed in the popular discourse since I was growing up. If a movie like Lean on Me came out today, it would be rightfully castigated on Black Twitter and other spaces for proper liberal commentary. The embrace of CRT and critical theory in general, was a direct result of the failure of the politics presented in Lean on Me. A failure best evidenced by the presidency of Barack Obama.

Obama as candidate and president was a product of the same politics that produced movies like Lean on Me. He supported welfare-to-work requirements. He created My Brothers Keeper, essentially a mentoring network for young Black and Latino men. He emphasized school metrics produced by standardized tests and promoted school choice. He criticized Black kids for wanting a gold chain over a bank account. He cited Chris Rock’s “Niggas vs Black people” routine. He told Morehouse graduates that Black men were out of excuses. He once told Michael Eric Dyson that he “doesn’t see himself as a victim”. 

In 2019, he said this to Black kids at a My Brothers Keeper event in Oakland:

“Oftentimes racism, historically in this society, sends you a message that you are less than and weak. We feel like we got to compensate by exaggerating certain stereotypical ways that men are supposed to act, and that’s a trap that we fall into that we have to pull out of.”

And when the financial crisis of 08 wiped out more than half of Black family wealth, Obama’s first instinct was not to address the historical inequalities, created by purposeful political choices, that left Black America more susceptible to economic instability. His first instinct was to protect the system that made his donors rich and propelled him personally to power. Black wealth was on precarious ground before the recession and has never fully recovered since. 

Obama was deeply dedicated to the idea of a post-racial America, even as his critics from the right tried their hardest to convince him otherwise. In fact, listening to what Obama actually said and didn’t say about race in America, it would be hard to separate him from Black conservatives and classical liberals like Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, let alone situate him in any Black radical tradition. Obama, like other anti-Black politicians and pundits, believed that America had ironed out most of its major problems and all that was left was for Black people to match that energy. 

As if Black people bore some modicum of responsibility for slavery, Jim Crow, slavery 2.0 with prison labor, the drug war, the racist application of social spending, deindustrialization, redlining, a racially biased justice system, and all the other social factors that have lead to concentrated poverty and crime within urban Black neighborhoods. 

Call on Me Brother

What CRT and CRT-informed pedagogy contributed was to introduce a systematic explanation for these inequities. One more rooted in historical and material reality. Not because Black people are naturally lazy and inclined to want others to solve their problems, but because history consistently proves that bootstrapping is not a scalable solution for systemic inequality. It requires more work, more effort, and more self-respect to attempt to organize and push for systemic change than it does to indulge in the magical thinking of mass individual self-improvement. 

And we see the results of this in the social activism taken up not just by Black youth but kids from all sorts of demographic and economic backgrounds. When social mores don’t enforce complacency with the unfairness and harm endemic to American capitalist exploitation, people tend to organize against it. And in the process, these kids have won real reforms and made real progress that isn’t limited to whether their personal wealth is reflected in a bank account or a gold chain. 

Chris Smalls has done more to help Black people’s economic fortunes by organizing a union at Amazon while dripped out in his gold chain and fronts than My Brothers Keeper has by teaching Black boys how to wear a tie. 

In the end, the anti-Blackness that I grew up with and that was celebrated and promoted by a Black elite was ultimately proven to be much more disempowering than giving kids a structural critique. Black culture has a much longer tradition of interdependence and solidarity than it does with capitalist self-commodification. And it's that solidarity that is necessary for Black people to gain true equality in America, rather than the atomizing “good Blacks vs bad Blacks” political messaging of anti-Blackness. It’s the worst-kept secret that this is what the anti-woke commentariat is afraid of. Not that Black kids will give into powerlessness, but that Black kids will realize where true power lies and use it to create systems in their own image. 

Solidarity Forever.